Digital broadcast has globally growing at a rapid pace. Accordingly in Japan, Broadcast Satellite (BS) digital broadcast has started from December, 2000, and ground digital broadcast is expected to start in 2003. With the above changes, TV viewing has rapidly changed. Not only the present real time viewing, but also non-linear as well as recorded viewing are also possible.
In the prior art of the current applicants, a digest generation system for non-linear viewing generates a digest or summary image from a program. The program includes additional program information or metadata such as an image index. The summary generation system searches an image scene that is considered to be important according to the metadata and generates a digest version of the image. In the above digest system, since the important scene includes audio data, the descriptive text for the image content has been processed based upon an idea that it is sufficient to generate an index summary.
The above prior art technology is described in detail in the following five references.
(1) “Discussion on Digest Viewing Method Using Program Index,” Hashimoto et al, Image Information Media Academy, Broadcast Study Group, pp 7–12, March (1999).
(2) “Prototype For Digest Generation Method Using Program Index,” Hashimoto et al, Data Engineering Workshop (DEWS' 99) on CD-ROM, March (1999).
(3) “Prototype For Digest Generation Method at Television Set,” Hashimoto et al, ADBS 99, December (1999).
(4) “Discussion on Digest Description Generation Method,” Shiroda et al, Information Processing, Academy DBS 120-15, January (2000).
(5) “Prototype For Digest Generation System for Soccer Match Program,” Hashimoto et al, 11th Data Engineering Workshop (DEWS 100) CD-ROM (2000).
The above prototypes have implemented the meaning analysis of the image content based upon the program additional information attached to the program image, the determination and extraction of important scenes based upon the user's interests, and the generation of the corresponding descriptive text. For example, according to the digest generation method as proposed by the applicants, when the athletic image is baseball, the importance degree is calculated for actual events such as a home run and a timely hit based upon an event pattern of metadata associated with the corresponding image. To generate a digest that reflects the flow of a game, it is necessary to accurately determine the importance of the events or plays in the athletic image and to consider the impact of the event on the game. For this reason, it is desirable to evaluate the game or match progression to consider the impact of the event on the game.
Despite the above considerations, the prior art digest generation methods fail to provide a mechanism for taking the game progression or the time line into account in determining the importance of the events or plays. The above described prior art digest generation methods thus fail to distinguish the importance of a score immediately after the beginning of a game over another score immediately before the end of the game. As a result, it is not possible to determine the importance of the events or plays in view of the game progression. For example, the importance is different for a score between immediately after the beginning of the game and immediately before the end of the game, and the importance is also different in scoring one point between a 1-0 game and a game where the score difference is larger. It is also not possible to rank the importance of each of the multiple scores in view of the game flow. For example, among eight points, the above prior art technology methods cannot determine which point is the most significant in the game progress. Furthermore, since the above prior art digest generation methods determined the importance based only on the event or play patterns, the importance of certain events such as failed but close shots without scoring in a soccer game or a close fly ball in a baseball game has not been determined. In other words, the importance has not been considered for its impact on the game flow in the athletic event. The close, but failed event is the one such as a shot or a fly that could change the score right after the failed event, but the score has not changed due to failure. For example, assuming that a soccer match ended with a 8-2 score, the importance of the close, but failed shot by the away team at the 2-2 score is more significant than that of the eighth goal by the home team because the failed shot could have reversed the score. The above described prior art technologies are not able to determined the importance of the close, but failed shot.
When the digests that are generated by the above prior art technologies are compared to those that are manually generated at broadcast stations, there is a high degree of match for the score-changing events such as goals in soccer. On the other hand, there is an extremely low degree of match for the failed events such as a close, but failed shot since the prior art technologies failed to extract these failed events. In other words, it is clearly desirable to generate a digest that matches human perception of the importance of the failed event.
Accordingly, the current invention addresses the above problems by determining the importance of the event in view of the game progression in generating digests for athletic footage. Similarly, the current invention addresses the above problems by determining the importance of the event in view of its impact in generating digests for athletic footage. Lastly, the current invention addresses the above problems by determining the importance of potentially score-changing events in view of its impact on the game and by ranking these events before generating digests for the athletic footage.